I’ve been using LingoDeer lately - not frequently as my consistency sucks but I do like it I was mainly curious as it seems to label its beginner course as equivalent to N5, so does that mean I could pass N5 using it? Highly doubtful but it tickles me - I could do a mock test and see how I do
Though there are definitely some things I think could be improved - I don’t seem the benefit of spelling out the sentences (though granted my hirigana is pretty solid), and I think it would be helpful to have some questions without the english or audio in some places as I feel it can be a safety net a little bit, but I admit I don’t really know what that would look like.
Yes, and it’s a shame. They have a semi-new reading section with new stories, but it’s woefully underadvertised (I wasn’t aware of it when I was using it until I miss-clicked on the screen). Removing the discussions was another weird move on their part, and it was probably because moderating all of the negative feedback was becoming a time sink.
I was on a binge recently and decided to try Duolingo for languages other than Japanese. Mandarin Chinese started off pretty decent, but I quickly realized that the pronunciations of hanzi are inconsistent across voice samples. However, when giving the Korean course a try I struggled massively with romanization barely matching the sounds, especially “d” and “t”, where the sound clearly matched “d”, but apparently it was the “t” sound (?).
Is the Korean romanization just a little weird and it’s best to learn Hangeul as quickly as possible or is it because the Duolingo voice samples are in general very bad for languages that heavily depend on pronunciation?
I know we’ve been recently complaining quite a bit about Duolingo, but I wanted to give it an honest try for languages other than Japanese and so far my experience is very lackluster .
It’s less Duolingo itself and more the reliance on text-to-speech. Imagine trying to learn English from Alexa.
It’s fine for bite sized learning but I wouldn’t rely on it for pronunciation at all.
Edit: I take that back. I just checked the Mandarin and it looks like they do have recorded audio. The problem seems to be that the words are broken up into sound bites so pronunciation is stilted and little off sometimes. The tones are fairly clear though.
To be honest, Alexa doesn’t sound half bad . It might sound robotic sometimes, but it does get the intonation of individual words rather well.
Which is probably true, but also unfortunate . My knowledge of Hangeul is non-existent so I guess learning Korean through Duolingo would be a trial of blood and pain…
I will see how bad the Swedish course is - a language that my girlfriend likes quite a bit and which I thought I might give a try. But since it’s a very melodic language, I can already see Duolingo with its new voices being a questionable choice .
EDIT: But the reviews of the Swedish course are rather positive so might give it a try.
But does that mean the pronunciation in Mandarin is correct and I’m just mishearing it or is it significantly off sometimes? I’m asking, because if I ever commit, I wouldn’t want to learn incorrect pronunciations and later have to fight with bad habits.
I don’t think it’s off per se, I mean, I didn’t have any issues understanding most of it. But it didn’t sound natural. I’d say it’s good enough to just go with for now if you’re starting as a complete beginner.
Duolingo shines for absolute beginners learning European languages who are themselves native speakers of a (different but related) European language. In this way, you can just take for granted a lot of common pronunciation, word roots and grammar, and you just learn the differences. For learning Asian languages as you’ve tried, then without that advantage and with highly different pronunciation schemes, it just gets messy. And if you’re past the beginner stage, then Duolingo’s classic translation format (in any language) is frustratingly boring and less effective. But for some languages I think once you get advanced enough they’re overcoming that with a question/response style, as well as their reading exercises. So if you want to advance your (minimal) French, revive your long lost high school level Spanish, or practice basic German before a holiday, that’s where it shines.
I think that’s part of why people felt so let down by the Japanese course. But given the limitations of the format, I think they did a great job with the Japanese course. It’s just that the format limitations (text to speech and need to have a better link between volunteer course creators and the programmers) can create some deal-breaking problems. In the case of the Japanese Duolingo course, there were too many words that had the wrong reading, so I just couldn’t trust the audio for new vocab, which defeated the purpose. On the other hand, the Japanese stories look great for close to absolute beginners! I wish they had been there when I was at that level.
I think you’re onto something here. In other words, since one can rely on educated guesses when learning different European languages, the initial barrier is not as high.
I think the general issue is that such a system is too restrictive to be useful as you said beyond the beginner stage. Which makes me wonder, because there are slightly more flexible systems which rely on partial word matching. What kind of saves Duolingo is the word tiles, but that takes a way a significant part of the challenge.
The other issue was the new voices which had terrible pitch accent, often all over the place. The old robotic voices maybe sounded a little unnatural, but had a better pitch.
I think with the Korean course the issue is way worse than even for the Chinese course, because some words have vastly different pronunciations, some of which completely don’t match the romanization system Duolingo uses. For instance, 'cow milk" is “uyu” going by very flattened reading of the 우유 characters and how it was pronounced in the first sample I heard, but just now I heard “uyyou” from a female voice sample .
EDIT: Now I heard something that vaguely sounded like “gwiyou”
The romanization itself looks like a forced English pronunciation which makes no sense for some sounds (like “i” being romanized to “yi” even though “i” in European languages is a single sound and that’s how it’s combined with other characters in Hangeul to form compounds).
Yeah I think this is where Duolingo has been most effective for me. As a native English speaker and someone who took Spanish in high school, I’ve gotten more out of the Spanish and Portuguese courses than the Japanese course. The grammar and vocabulary for those languages are already much closer to that of English, so I’m not getting murdered by Duolingo’s (in my opinion) lackluster grammar notes/explanations. Whereas with Japanese where pretty much everything is fundamentally different, I get tripped up more often.
I kind of wanted to take a similar approach to brush up on my German and I think I will continue the course, but the structure in the initial lessons is mind-numbingly simplistic (f.e. “a mother and a father”) and they’re overdoing it with definite/indefinite articles in the translations to make them too literal . Not to mention the new voices sound like no German speaker I have heard before. Especially the buff/sports dude who sounds like ordering a coffee after running a full marathon (ein Kaffee…bitte…).
I gave the reverse JP-EN tree another try today and just felt my IQ dropping from how literal and unnatural the Japanese sentences are. Many of the Japanese natives commented the same in the comment sections .
The Korean course got a little better after I got used to the romanization scheme and installed a Hangeul IME on my PC. I’m still struggling massively with Korean pronunciation in general, but that’s no Duolingo’s fault . It’s also nice that they mix in simple words like “nose” and “milk” into the initial Hangeul lessons for practice!
Duolingo was the first thing I ever picked up for learning Japanese and I immediately felt that while not “useless,” it’s ratio of usefulness:time is not worth bothering with.
I picked up LingoDeer which is the same kinda deal but found it to be 100x better. The beginning of every chapter has grammar explanations for the point in the lesson that are no less clear than anything I’ve read in Genki or AIAIJ. You actually know why you’re doing what you’re doing, whereas the Duolingo course was just like “throw stuff at a wall and see if any of it sticks.” I hadn’t touched LingoDeer for a long time until recently because I finished the Japanese I and II courses on it back before COVID, but I recently opened it up just to do some lessons for fun and forgot how good it is.
The thing about Duolingo for Japanese is it’s reasonable for one to expect it to, well, teach you Japanese. I’m afraid this will lead a lot of people to jumping into it, not getting results, getting disheartened and quitting the hobby. Little things like that early on can really make or break your interest in something. I actually personally know a couple people who went through the Duolingo program but gave up on Japanese and I think not feeling like anything much had been learned after all that time had a lot to do with it.
I really wish they would stop changing their learning tree/path or whatever. I’m a creature of habit. I feel like all that time and effort would be better spent on improving content.
And I LIKE Duolingo so I can only imagine how other people who don’t care for it feel.
I remember I tried to learn Japanese via Duolingo when it first came out and, while it wasn’t THAT bad, it wasn’t good either.
You know how Japanese has no plurals? Well, Duoling thought it would be funny to have 花 and the pictures of a tree, grass, one flower, and many flowers. It always came down to luck because it never stated if it meant flower or flowers… I’ve never been the same ever since…
I’m praying for everyone’s sanity that that problem was fixed
I think it’s a good resource to get started and give Japanese a test drive, see if you’re into it before investing all the time and money it actually requires. (Helped me to decide between French, German, Portuguese and Japanese )
P.S. This applies to many language learning sites btw. They are good to test out the language and get important phrases like “where’s the bathroom”, but you won’t get far with them. Even when they ARE good, like wanikani is for kanji, you need to complement them with something else for the grammar, listening, speech, etc.
I’m not sure about the flower/flowers issue from before, but the current Japanese tree to me suffers from the following issues
Confusing split of kana in the Word Bank
Forcing one to form excessively complete, unnatural sentences no one ever uses
Too strict mapping between English and Japanese grammar structures without accepting valid alternatives, sentence order, etc.
New voices poorly fitting Japanese pitch accent
Strange choice of example sentences (musings about the environment, natural resources, cities no one needs to name if wanting to go to Japan, etc.)
EDIT: This kind of boils down to trying to take an Asian language and applying a Latin language-based mindset to learning.
Meanwhile, the German tree is doing much better
Actually useful phrases one can practice “in the wild”
Mixing sentence bits and vocab in a way that removes bias
Relying on much stricter sentence order, typical of German, which to me personally was a massive help to avoid copy-pastas from English
However, some things could be improved
Ungrammatical English translations
Heavy reliance on US English
New voices often mess up intonation in questions
Words people don’t use often (f.e. Apfelschorle - apparently a drink popular in Germany and Austria. I’ve never seen it in either of these countries, despite living in them. There is Aperol, though.)
Sometimes too strict mapping for grammar structures, but one can get used to it at least at the level I’m at right now
Above being said, I happily grind the German tree daily, because it legitimately does help my crippling A2-B1 level.
I would say it’s not as popular as it was a few years back but I can confirm you would be hard pressed to find anyone growing up in these countries not knowing the drink. (It’s just apple juice mixed with some sparkling water, can be had in many other fruit flavors and even wine as well ^^)
It may also be that Sparkling Apple Cider is pretty well known in the US, specifically as something that’s put on the table so the kids and non-alcoholics can have something to drink. I was at a wedding over the weekend and it was on the table.
Maybe they’re trying to avoid alcoholic references to not come off as stereotypical?
You mean like the multitude of sentences with red wine?
I’m not trying to argue that Apfelschorle doesn’t exist, but that there are many more popular options one could pick from. But maybe also the authors of the course are super keen on Apfelschorle, who knows!
Yeah, I think the problem here is also that the English translation in the course is “sparkling apple juice”. If they kept the non-translated Apfelschorle, it would’ve been easier to relate to. However, if you then get an English sentence with “sparkling apple juice” and reverse-engineer it into German, Duo doesn’t accept Apfelsaft gespritzt.
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. It might sound robotic sometimes, but it does get the intonation of individual words rather well.
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